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Joan Aiken spent the last part of her career writing a small shelf of Austen sequels, and Eliza's Daughter is the one I think she did best. The premise is wonderfully cruel. In Sense and Sensibility, Austen tells us in passing that Colonel Brandon's ward Eliza was seduced and abandoned by Willoughby, gave birth to a daughter, and died. Aiken picks up that daughter and gives her two hundred pages and a name.
Eliza-the-younger grows up far from the Dashwood orbit, fostered in a poor household and then thrown into a more punishing version of the same social system that her mother could not survive. Aiken writes with full Austen pastiche skills and full anger at what Austen's class system actually did to women who fell out of its protection. The result is a book that is both technically charming and morally biting.
Four stars. You will get more out of it if you have read Sense and Sensibility recently, but it stands well enough on its own. A small, sharp pleasure.
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